A Picnic Supper

Richard told me to ignore the hops in his garden.
He has no interest in making beer this fall.
But they looked so lovely, I couldn't help myself.

A shame to do yard work and then not enjoy each patch of grass that has been fertilized or mowed or trimmed or in the case of our house, edged this week by Mati. 

The edging has done by Mati. All the other work is Richard’s. 

I bent over to dig out some dandelions, one patch leading to another that was just one more crawl away, if I could just move one knee ahead of the other. 

Now I am paying for the passion of having a totally green lawn. And I failed. Every day there are new patches of dandelions. I am getting to that I recognize the mature ones, go after them and then their medium counterparts and I leave the fledgling dandelion plants for next year when they will have gained mature status.

I ask myself the question, how to enjoy all of this work, remembering many happy parties in the backyard of yester yore. So, I packed a picnic lunch and headed up the stairs to my backyard. I had cauliflower, caramelized-onion hummus, two oranges, a Greek salad and I left behind the Asian pear I had cut up. Asian pears come in 12’s at Costco. I tried to share mine with Richard, but he would have none of them. He said, I want a pear or I want an apple. I don’t like my pear and apple mixed up. Not juicy enough in the first case, and not firm enough in the second case.

Finally a plant that will grow at breakneck speed.

He has some specific likes and dislikes. I tried my hand at offering him kiwi by carefully skinning them, cutting them in green rounds so that the circling decoration of the tiny black seeds in the middle was beautiful, laying one on top of another. But beauty of presentation wasn’t enough. He still wouldn’t take a piece of the 3 kiwis I had cut. No problem. That is just the right amount for me.

Back to my picnic, sans Asian pears since I left then downstairs. I did bring along The New Yorker for company, a pen to circle all of the hard words that I am going to wonder what they mean as I read, and I packed everything in a bag. I picked the new-to-us round garden table to read at, facing the small patch of new grass I have been watering, and looking out to see the tall brown wooden fence of the neighbour. That is a visually blank field and helps me to return by eyes to the page. I paused for a minute to remember that I could have been looking at a painted fence, since the guy who had been hired to do other work in the yard next door knocked on my door to say that the owner of the house wasn’t around, was going to paint the fence and that if I would give him the money to do it, it could be done before the owner came back. I knew not to give him the money.

I didn’t know why that fleeting thought ran through my head as I picked up my book to read and eat. I guess because the wood is now deteriorating. Eat and read. I don’t know which came first nor how I finished off the lunch except to think to myself, “Next time bring a bigger bag so that you get all of the food into it, even the pears.”

I used packing tape to get the hops growing up the side of his deck.
I go water the plants every day.
I twist the tendrils in the directions I want them to go.
I am deliriously happy doing this.

I don’t usually give myself the luxury of just sitting and reading. I try to do reading together with one of the following: my exercises; lathering hand cream on my aching fingers; dental flossing, or braiding my hair. I like to see words floating by while I am doing something else. But yesterday on my picnic, doing nothing else, I read with the slight Alberta chinook breeze making me hold the pages of the journal down on the table as I devoured column by column, each article. I thought about the small business Richard works in as I read Margaret Talbot’s article, “The Rogue Experimenters: D.Y.I. scientists take on the medical establishment”. The title tells it all.

And when I came to the Critic at Large column there was a review called the “Cinematic treatment of Plagues”.

I am a movie-goer.

I am also a reader of reviews, so every movie was familiar to me, in one respect or another, even the reference to E.F. Murnau’s “Nosferatu (1922) and “Faust” (1926).

Just to the east of the backyard deck is a dead birch.
On it hangs the antlers and bones from animals
we have eaten during the winter.
I call this his antler tree.
If it were a piece of artwork I might title it
Tribute to the Meals of 2019-2020

Murnau knew that depth of field was tied up to depth of feeling about stories. I learned about Murnau’s work when I took a History of Film course.

I had no idea I would ever read anything else that referenced him but there I was and there he was, a happy moment for me.

I loved the line about Murnau’s plague, “When it arrives it’s not some invisible foe, but a rat-gray mist that creeps through the winding passages ways ….”

I pause a minute to think about our own plague which is the former, not the latter.

Eventually the cold drove me inside, because mine was an evening picnic.

When I got inside, I opened up The New Yorker to read again, but I missed the pleasantness of our now greening backyard.

Arta